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[elpollodiablo]

pollo:  how comfortable are you with looking through your system registry?  Could be a few different things going on but the first thing I'd do is open the registry editor and search for any instances of that filename.  This isn't a good idea for a novice though, 'cause it's too easy to cock something up pretty bad.

It worked, though! A couple of boots into safe mode and some serious rooting around in the sysreg, I was able to expel all the baddies... Also completely removed IE, which was the problem in the first place. My girlfriend still uses IE over FF if presented with the opportunity, and from her surfing around with the piece of shit for a few days, it nearly nuked my whole setup here. I've never had much use for all the popular security programs out there; if you just use FF and are smart about your surfing habits, you're gonna be okay 99% of the time. But just taking IE out for a spin for half an hour is enough to fuck your world up, one time.

[diesel_powered]

What I have:

A turntable (with needle)
A mixer with a phono preamp
A fairly nice audio interface box

What I need:

A program (preferably free) that makes it easy to record vinyl with the above setup, split the vinyl into tracks, and export MP3's for the iPod. Any suggestions?

[SPACERACE]

cubase, logic, protools

line in, hit record, bounce to wav, convert

i mean, audacity will do that, but you know the drawbacks to that, and i assume you have something better.

[diesel_powered]

Yeah, I was just hoping for something slightly more convenient than that. What do you want? I'm lazy.

[SPACERACE]

yeah, it's the only way i can think of right now to record a line-level input signal into a computer.

[Keith from TTIKTDA]

Yeah, I was just hoping for something slightly more convenient than that. What do you want? I'm lazy.

http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/imic/

Final Vinyls actually not bad if you just need simple.

You want better quality? Use any app you want to do the recording, and use soundsoap to take out the skips/pops.

[dumbfish]

Follow-up:
Feeling cheap right now, so just replacing the HD.  Caution sticker on the drive includes advice that's obvious ("Avoid giving shock") and amusing ("Rattle noise is normal").

It's a Toshiba, which means it has a 3-year warranty.  And how long have I had it?  About 38 months.  Well played, my Japanese friends.  For now, probably going to just replace it with the same drive (about $70).

[silentsigh89]

I think I need  a tech tutor. My mother's computer, when you turn it on is either:

A) saying there is a disc read error and telling you to restart

B) freezing on the logo before start up

C) starting up normally and then jamming after about two minutes


she says that she hasn't downloaded or changed anything, but I can't say if  that's for sure. I tried to start it in safe mode a few times but it wouldn't bring up the menu. it would just freeze if I tried.

[leslie]

that sounds a lot like a virus or a glut of nastyu spyware. Next time she gets it started, immediately download ad-aware (the free version, google will offer it to you here:
http://pack.google.com/intl/en/product_info.html?adaware
and spybot search and destroy (also free)
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
and then download the most recent upates to both, run ad aware first then spybot S&D and then you might be in much better shape than when you started. If not- she might have a more malicious virus or some sort of hardware malfunction.

[silentsigh89]

I have run ad-aware and a virus thing. it froze halfway through and the computer turned itself off.

but thank you!

[YojimboMonkey]

Sounds more like a hardware problem than a software one to me.  My first impression is that the hard drive is failing, which could cause any one of those three things, but it also could be bad RAM.  Do you ever hear a clicking sound when you power it on?  That would definitely indicate bad hard drive.  I'd seriously have someone who knows something about computers take a look at it, 'cause I'm pretty sure there's going to be hardware replacement in your future.  Or if it's under warranty, call the manufacturer's tech support, but the first thing they're going to have you do is run a system recovery which will unfortunately wipe out any data you have stored on that hard drive.  So you definitely want someone with some computer savvy to help you try to back up that hard drive before proceeding any farther with the troubleshooting process, at least if there's any data stored on the computer that you want saved.

[jebreject]

How old is the computer?

I can't pretend to know a whole lot about computers, but it sounds to me that that could very likely be an actual hardware problem.  Anyone back me up on this?

[jebreject]

whoa, xpost

[silentsigh89]

ah. all right. it's an e-machine. I really hope it's under warranty! I'll try to figure that out.

[Good Intentions]

Your hard drive is going. Take it to a friend's place, plug it into his machine, dump everything you want to save from your drive to his and get a new one. Do so immidiately.

[diesel_powered]

Two questions:

1. Does anyone know of a servicable and affordable/free audio cleanup plugin for vinyl? Since I'm playing off the laptop these days, I'm recording all my records and they've seen better days. Hitting them with the D4 helps, but they're DJ records.

2. Anybody purchase a reliable laptop cooler recently? I had one, but it's fan is squeaking in an unbearably annoying manner.

[Andrew_TSKS]

my computer shat the bed this morning.

i was trying to burn a cd, and it wasn't working, but the cd burner got stuck in an endless loop of speeding up then slowing down. so finally i cancelled the burn and decided to try to reboot. well, when i DID reboot, i got the blue screen of death. it said i was victim of a "registry_ERROR". i tried rebooting several times, tried going into safe mode, tried "last known good configuration", all resulted in the same blue screen of death. so, in light of that, i have some questions.

first off, what do you guys think has happened to my computer? i mean, it's not perfect, but i didn't think it was on its last legs or anything. should i assume that all data that was on the hard drive is now gone? i mean, if it is, that's not terrible, because most of my stuff is on my external hard drive these days. i would lose a few record reviews, but that's it as far as writing. however, while it's not life-ending to lose my mp3 collection, i wouldn't exactly be happy for it to happen.

secondly, what do i need to do with this damn thing? should i assume it needs a particular new piece of hardware and replace said item, should i just throw up my hands and take it to a computer repair guy who will charge me an arm and a leg, what?

[milly balgeary]

my computer shat the bed this morning.

i was trying to burn a cd, and it wasn't working, but the cd burner got stuck in an endless loop of speeding up then slowing down. so finally i cancelled the burn and decided to try to reboot. well, when i DID reboot, i got the blue screen of death. it said i was victim of a "registry_ERROR". i tried rebooting several times, tried going into safe mode, tried "last known good configuration", all resulted in the same blue screen of death. so, in light of that, i have some questions.

first off, what do you guys think has happened to my computer? i mean, it's not perfect, but i didn't think it was on its last legs or anything. should i assume that all data that was on the hard drive is now gone? i mean, if it is, that's not terrible, because most of my stuff is on my external hard drive these days. i would lose a few record reviews, but that's it as far as writing. however, while it's not life-ending to lose my mp3 collection, i wouldn't exactly be happy for it to happen.

secondly, what do i need to do with this damn thing? should i assume it needs a particular new piece of hardware and replace said item, should i just throw up my hands and take it to a computer repair guy who will charge me an arm and a leg, what?

certainly don't take it to a computer repair guy. you can build a pc from what it costs for them to scrutinize it. you can try

what are you using? xp? go into the bios and switch to boot from cd, insert your windows cd, and reboot. reinstall windows. can you do that without reformatting your hd? i can't remember. i think so. do that, go in, burn your mp3s, once finished, reinstall windows with a new format of your hd, rinse, repeat.

[YojimboMonkey]

OK first thing Andrew, do you know how to get to the Windows boot menu?  You should be able to get there by hitting the F8 button at just the right time between the POST and the Windows splash screen, just before Windows actually starts to boot.  The absolute first thing you should try, before you follow Milly's suggestion, is to go to the Windows boot menu and try the "Last Known Good Configuration" boot.  

Then report back.  I'll check back in now & again with more suggestions.

[Andrew_TSKS]

i did do that, and i still got the blue screen of death.

[YojimboMonkey]

OK my bad, should have read more closely.

since it sounds like you have a corrupt registry, doing a repair install might not be possible.  But you could try.  Boot from your Windows CD, go through the first couple of steps of setup.  Right after you hit F8 to accept the EULA it should search for previous installs.  If your registry is hosed, it probably won't find a previous install and will just prompt you to do an install to that partition.  Otherwise it will find the Windows install and give you the option to repair it.

A couple of things you might try first that probably won't fix it, but won't hurt, are disconnecting that CD-RW drive and going into your BIOS & choosing the "Failsafe defaults" option if there is one, or the "Reset configuration" option if there is one.

[Andrew_TSKS]

oh crazy. i don't even know how to do that. (by which i mean physically disconnecting the cd-rw drive)

oh man, just thinking about this is giving me a headache.

i'll try the repair thing though. you know, next time i'm around my computer. which won't be til sometime tomorrow night.

[SPACERACE]

yes you do.

assuming you know how to pull cables from the back of something.

[diesel_powered]

Yeah. Open the case, find the drive, there should be a wide ribbon cable and four wires hooked to a white harness. Wide ribbon = data, four wires = power.

Wabam.

[Andrew_TSKS]

so ok, i was busy all day yesterday and still haven't gotten around to trying this. but i do have a question: is everyone of the opinion that the only hardware that's fucked up is my cd-rw drive? or does this perhaps indicate a corruption of the actual hard drive? or what?

because like, i've also been having this weird non-specific problem. well, i'll try and explain. starting about a year ago, my computer on several occasions did this thing where it suddenly for no apparent reason crashed. like, shut down and either restarted or shut down and i had to power it back up myself. in either case, as soon as it booted back up, it gave me one of those microsoft error reports that said "windows has recovered from a serious error". that's all, nothing more specific than that. i reinstalled windows xp earlier this year, and figured that would take care of the problem, but it's happened once recently, about two weeks ago. is this some unconnected problem? or could the problems with the cd-rw drive be causing these errors, somehow? (it's never happened while i was using the cd-rw drive, so i'd think the answer to that question is no, but i have to ask). could THIS problem indicate critical problems with my hard drive? or perhaps with my ram? anyone got any idea?